Good, Bad & Ugly Review: Stage Fright

Rotten Tomatoes Rating: 50% (Critics) / 96% (Audience)Directed By: Jerome SableWritten By: Jerome SableStarring: Minnie Driver, Douglas Smith, Allie MacDonald, Ephraim Ellis and
Meat LoafStudio: Entertainment OneSynopsis: Starry-eyed teenager Camilla Swanson wants to follow in her mother’s footsteps and become a Broadway diva, but she’s stuck working in the kitchen of a snobby performing arts camp. Determined to change her destiny, she sneaks in to audition for the summer showcase and lands a lead role in the play, but just as rehearsals begin, blood starts to spill, and Camilla soon finds herself terrified by the horror of musical theatre. – (Source)

The Good:
STAGE FRIGHT gets points for originality…setting a slasher movie at a musical theater camp is a new one to add to the genre. And making it into a full scale musical horror movie was not something you see every day either. And that needs to be stressed; a lot of things I have seen written about STAGE FRIGHT has mentioned it was a mash-up of “Glee and SCREAM” which is not true at all. This is a musical-musical where people break out into song at a moments notice and sing their inner thoughts and whatnot. A better description would be “Phantom of The Opera meets Sleepaway Camp”.
And I absolutely loved that the killer in this movie sang all of his songs like a demented Brian Johnson of AC/DC.

The Bad:
For a slasher movie their was an alarming lack of slashing for my taste. This movie really needed to up the body count and play around more with some of the tropes of the slasher genre than it did.

The Ugly:
For a musical these songs were dreadful. There were no songs that are likely to get stuck in your head like “Let It Go”, instead you just want everyone to shut up and get busy with the killings.

Final Verdict: An ambitious stab at adding something new to the slasher horror genre but nothing really works as well as you can tell everyone involved wanted it to. Not nearly bloody enough for slasher fans and not equipped with songs good enough for musical fans, STAGE FRIGHT just fails to deliver to either audience.